Below, you’ll find a list of key reading skills and simple explanations to help you understand what your child is learning and how you can assist them. These skills are essential building blocks for becoming a confident and proficient reader.
Below, you’ll find a list of key reading skills and simple explanations to help you understand what your child is learning and how you can assist them. These skills are essential building blocks for becoming a confident and proficient reader.
Phonemic Awareness: Playing with the sounds in words to help your child hear and recognize them.
Phonics: Learning the sounds that letters make and how to put them together to read words.
Fluency: Reading smoothly and with expression, like talking.
Vocabulary: Knowing lots of words and what they mean.
Comprehension: Understanding and thinking about what is read.
Blending: Putting sounds together to make words (e.g., /c/ /a/ /t/ makes “cat”).
Decoding: Figuring out new words by sounding them out.
Sight Words: Words your child can recognize right away without sounding them out (e.g., “the,” “and”).
Context Clues: Using the other words in a sentence to help figure out what a new word means.
Fluency Practice: Fun activities that help your child read faster and more accurately.
Graphic Organizers: Simple charts or diagrams that help your child organize information from a story.
Inferencing: Making smart guesses about what’s happening in a story based on clues.
Phoneme: The smallest sound in a word (e.g., the /b/ sound in “bat”).
Prefix/Suffix: Little parts added to the beginning or end of a word to change its meaning (e.g., “un-” in “unhappy” or “-ed” in “played”).
Scaffolding: Giving your child support to learn something new until they can do it on their own.
Segmenting: Breaking words down into their individual sounds (e.g., “cat” into /c/ /a/ /t/).
Syntax: The order of words in a sentence to make it make sense.
References
Reading Rockets. (n.d.). Reading 101: A guide for parents. https://www.readingrockets.org/literacy-home/reading-101-guide-parents
Roskos, K., & Neuman, S. (n.d.). Best practices in reading: A 21st century skill update. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/about-reading/articles/best-practices-reading-21st-century-skill-update
The Literacy Bug. (2020, March 29). 12 recommended resources to support reading development across age groups. https://www.theliteracybug.com/journal/2020/29/3/suggested-online-resources-to-support-reading-development-across-age-groups